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Thursday, March 26, 2009

Short Takes

NPR’s Studio 360 will feature the poem “Night Hunting” from FREE UNION in this weekend’s show. The spot is called “Good Poet Hunting”: “John Casteen IV teaches poetry at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. He’s also an avid hunter. Jesse Dukes went deep into the woods with Casteen to track deer and talk poetry.”

The American Book Review notes that although the short story is falling into increasing disfavor in the publishing world, “The University of Georgia Press’s Flannery O’Connor Award...takes this as its challenge and has released some of the most challenging and rewarding short fiction of the last three decades.” Their review of DROWNING LESSONS and THE THEORY OF LIGHT AND MATTER concludes: “Both these collections, Porter’s more deeply and more consistently, are able to cut…to the emotional quick of the human experience with stunning compression. That is the short story’s role, what it exists to do—though maybe, in a country most comfortable with the easy narrative of the sitcom and reality show, also its undoing. It’s lucky for the small readership that will find these books that the University of Georgia Press still produces them.” The submission period for this year’s competition opens April 1.

In the most recent issue of Southern Cultures, Leon Fink writes: “There have always been several Souths. It is precisely those already nationally integrated that will most easily and successfully accommodate to globalist influences and identities… GROUNDED GLOBALISM is a testament to just how rich a life can be led through such experience and opportunity.”

From The Journal of the Early Republic: “In EQUIANO, THE AFRICAN: BIOGRAPHY OF A SELF-MADE MAN, Vincent Carretta has culminated a remarkable historical inquiry that has already yielded Unchained Voices, a superbly annotated anthology of Anglo–Atlantic black literature, as well as equally well-researched editions of Ignatius Sancho and Ottobah Cugoano.”

Two UGA faculty members honored with Creative Research Awards this week have ties with the press. Hugh Ruppersburg, author or editor of several UGA Press titles, most recently THE NEW GEORGIA ENCYCLOPEDIA COMPANION TO GEORGIA LITERATURE, received the Albert Christ-Janer Award for research in the humanities. Andrew Herod, co-editor of the press’s new Geographies of Social Justice series, received the William A. Owens Award for research in the social and behavioral sciences.